


Maps and Legends

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Genre: Drama & Romance, Multi, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-06 09:43:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8745298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: The child tactician of Sigurd's war finds himself adrift in the age of the New Crusaders. Oifey has served as a witness to Sigurd's sacrifice and Seliph's justice, but who will bear witness to his own struggle?





	1. No Indispensable Man

_(Lewyn)_

He’s certain he'll reach the stables only to find her gone, but she’s still there in the yard, all her meager belongings packed and Annand’s reins in her hand. 

“Lady Fee!”

She’s a princess, after all. Princess and de jure queen of the frozen north, if her brother never does turn up.

“Sir Oifey,” she says, all cheer and smiles as though she’s leaving on a holiday. “Come to see me off?”

“Of course. Lord Seliph is sending you to Leonster by yourself?"

He hopes it’s an error. Annand's large and brilliant eyes regard him with the queer intellect that surpasses that of an ordinary horse, but the cleverest of mounts can’t make a one-woman army out of Fee, and what Leonster needs is an army, not a well-armed scout. 

"Lord Seliph said that Lewyn wanted me to go and find out how bad a state the rebels were in, and I guess I'm the only one of us who can do it," she replies, any concerns for the flight across open sea concealed by a game face worthy of a veteran.

The simple admission stops him short. Lewyn-- not "my father," just "Lewyn"-- is issuing orders. Unilateral orders, without so much as consulting Oifey, and using Seliph as a conduit for them.

"Fee, please be careful,” he says quickly, falling into the practiced pose of the responsible adult and using that to paper over the sudden hurt to his pride. “If the cause there is hopeless, return to Lord Seliph's side as fast as you can."

"Don't worry about me on that count. I already learned there's not a lot useful to be done for the dead.”

She smiles again, but there’s something else in it now— a hint of Lewyn’s old insolence, an echo the sorrows of Erinys. With a dramatic cry she and Annand are aloft, without so much as a stray feather spiraling down to give him some tangible proof she was there.

He blots out the traces of Annand’s hooves from the dust before he returns to Lord Seliph.

_(Everyone Died)_

_I was a tactician in a war where everyone died._

He's been repeating that to himself for seventeen years, even though it’s not entirely true. Not everyone died. Edain lived to play mother to six small children, only two of them her own, and now uses the convent in Tirnanog to support a host of young women of Northern Isaach and the children some of these poor girls have borne on account of Dozel's marauding soldiers. Every life touched by Edain these seventeen years gives the lie to "everyone died."

Edain still lives. Dame Erinys returned to Silesse to become Queen Erinys and raise that startlingly bold daughter along with her missing son. Azelle and Tailtiu also reached Silesse before the Empire tore their little family in several directions. Raquesis made it to Isaach before turning southward toward Leonster on the perilous land route through the shifting sands of the Yied. Also down in Leonster, Finn had managed to survive long enough to launch the rebellion whose impending failure necessitated Lewyn sending Fee off across the seas.

That makes six. Seven, if one counts Lewyn, and Oifey knows no reason he shouldn't count Lewyn except for a feeling of unease deep in his gut when he looks at the errant king who’s appointed himself Lord Seliph’s new tactical advisor. But of that seven, Erinys and Tailtiu are certainly dead, Raquesis and Azelle both presumably so, and Finn might well be gone by the time Fee reaches Leonster.

He was a tactician in a war where almost everyone died, where the survivors were scattered too wide and too thinly to counter the Empire with any effect, and for this alone Oifey does not protest Lewyn’s presence at Lord Seliph’s elbow.

_(Vanilla)_

“While exotic spices from the great forests of Verdane have been highly prized for decades, under the reign of the late King Batur the essence of the vanilla orchid…”

The script that flows from Oifey’s pen wobbles just a little as the image of the murdered king flashes through his mind.   
    
“Vanilla essence became a key export thanks to the newfound popularity…”

To dislodge the bloody memory, Oifey begins to deliberately dwell upon something just as morbid and dramatic, but this time with a far happier ending.

“The newfound popularity of the flavor in the courts of Grannvale…”

His attention strays from the report he’s been penning for Lady Edain, and his fingers begin to itch for the box of colored pencils just out of reach. When Oifey reads the page over and finds it a muddle of repeated phrases and poor punctuation, he sighs and reaches for the enameled pencil-box.

He can re-write the report in the morning. It can’t possibly be worse than whatever Dew is turning in for their assignment. Oifey smooths out a page in the book where he sketches out practice battle plans and begins to scratch out something for its own sake.

_(Blindness)_

The sands of the fabled Yied remind Oifey, improbably enough, of the snows of Silesse. The pale-gold dunes are blinding in their stark beauty, and as they trudge across the desert the hooves of their mounts sink in, even as the horses of twenty years ago found it slow going in the cold powder on the Silessian hills. As they find themselves being outpaced by infantry, Oifey tells young Diarmuid of the improvised goggles that Sigurd’s soldiers used to keep from being blinded by sunlight bouncing off the snow.

“Your mother had a pair carved from pegasus ivory.”

“I wish I had them now,” says Diarmuid, and he sounds earnest but not wistful about the lost goggles. 

Oifey’s been watching over Diarmuid for years, waiting for his sunny disposition to darken as time and its mounting losses bear down on him, and so far Diarmuid hasn’t turned. It would be nice to have his mother’s goggles to shade his eyes in this terrible sun, but he doesn’t have them, and so he hums a little tune and urges his courser through the endless sand.

Oifey doesn’t know whether to treasure this strange innocence or to actively break Diarmuid of it; he never has, and he usually concludes— as he does now— that it’s some fault in himself that leads him to wonder how little Diarmuid can hate his circumstances. But there is the chance, and always has been, that Diarmuid has the most carefully kept facade of the children of Tirnanog, and so Oifey smiles and keeps the chatter light, pleasant, instructive.

Oifey assumes Raquesis must have taken that precious pair of goggles with her when she crossed this very desert, bound for Leonster. He wonders if she ever made it that far, or if the ivory goggles are somewhere under the sands, waiting for the winds to expose them to some future traveller.

_(Shannan)_

Not five hours after their reunion in sight of the ruins of Yied’s temple, Oifey realizes he doesn’t quite know Shannan anymore. There’s no physical change; Shannan sits in his customary cross-legged pose on the floor of their tent, running a silken rag over the curve of the Balmung. It’s the Shannan that Oifey’s always known, from the soft soles of his unadorned boots to the stray lock of hair dangling over his shoulder.

And yet, this isn't the Shannan who left Isaach in a hurry, hot on the trail of new clue regarding his legacy weapon. This is King Shannan, uncrowned but unquestioned sovereign of Isaach from northern coast to southern desert, invested with the full measure of his divine power. Even at rest the Balmung is edged in a silver-blue glow, just visible in the low light of the tent, and that radiance flows from the blade to Shannan's hands.

He’s seen this transformation before, but Oifey never found anything terrible about it when Prince Quan or Lewyn claimed their heritage, and if there was sorrow in Lord Sigurd taking possession of the Tyrfing it was entirely down to the circumstances. Maybe it’s because he’s known Shannan for so long that Oifey feels loss in this barrier of light rising between them. 

Maybe it’s because something in Oifey’s bones knows that in receiving this power, Shannan’s come one step closer to his own demise. Not that the Balmung carries the whispers of a curse the way the Gae Bolg and Mystletainn did… no, he’s never heard anything of the sort. But he feels it, all the same.

Then Shannan smiles, as though he’s only now noticed the marvelous light that bonds him to the blade, and Oifey sees him again as he was, as he’s always been.

_(Expectations)_

Oifey finds himself restless and must restrain himself from tapping a foot against the classroom tiles as Finn gives his report on the climate and geography of Verdane. It’s not nerves over his own report, as they all know Lady Edain is the kindest of teachers and has only ever reprimanded Dew— and only when when Dew failed to put forth any effort at all. None of them wish to disappoint her, of course, and that keeps the four students of Edain’s strange little school in line, but should Oifey stumble over his sentences while relaying vanilla’s importance to Verdane’s economy, Edain will praise Oifey’s work for its good points and guide him toward improvement on the rest. 

It isn’t nerves, then, and it isn’t boredom that’s caused this strange tension. On the contrary, he is almost too aware of Finn as the squire from Leonster does his best to hold everyone’s attention on a subject nearly as dull as economics— maybe more so, as everyone in the room has acquainted themselves already with the trees and lake and unyielding humidity of this land. The slant that Finn’s Leonster accent imparts to his speech is far more interesting than anything he has to say. When Oifey does rise to give his own report, he notices Finn’s polite attention far more than he does Dew’s glazed eyes or the way Shannan keeps glancing out the window. Oifey hears his delivery wobble and switches his focus to Lady Edain and her lovely smile, which allows him to stop saying the words in a rush.

It’s competition, Oifey decides as he dashes back to his room with perspiration streaming down both sides of his face. Nothing much is expected of Dew except that his morals might stay on course. Shannan is too young yet to keep pace with the lessons; it’s enough for Lady Edain that his letters improve from one week to the next. But Oifey and Finn are almost of an age, and Edain and Princess Ethlyn have expectations of both of them. 

Oifey reaches for his pencil-box to ease the tension borne of Princess Ethlyn’s expectations. He lets himself be lost, just for an hour, in the verdant swirls and crimson blots of his drawing. It’s Sir Midir that he’s drawn from memory— Midir as he was when Lord Sigurd and Oifey found him in the courtyard of Jungby, fallen but not extinguished, the most romantic sight Oifaye ever has beheld. Midir in his splendid defeat embodies everything Oifey’s learned of knighthood— love and pain and discipline, valor and duty and the nobility of sacrifice. As he adds another layer of color to the blood splashed along Sir Midir’s cheek, Oifey forgets entirely the meaningless drama of the classroom and thinks only of the larger, grander drama into which they’ve stumbled.


	2. The Only Virtue

_(Hello)_

She shows up in the foothills south of Darna on the strange day when Ares the Black Knight joins their company. He’s anticipated her return, has imagined the reassuring sight of Annand’s wings against the hazy sky, but instead she’s simply there at the campfire one night, a cup of steaming soup in her hands.

“I was excited when they said it was dumpling soup,” she says to him, as though casual chat about the food is the right way to say hello after so dramatic an absence. “But this isn’t much like what we had at home.”

And he understands her completely. The soup is typical camp fare, thin broth with flecks of dried vegetable. The dumplings are gritty, with some overcooked to mush and others still raw in the center. He's eaten such perhaps a thousand times in Isaach when out on patrol, but Oifey remembers the silken broth and tender dumplings of a proud Silessian’s table, delicately composed and yet hearty enough to propel Lord Sigurd’s army to victory through the cold and snow.

“The guy with the blue hair helped make it,” she says then, speaking of Edain’s son Lester. “I should’ve known it wouldn’t be good, as he’s kind of an ass.”

“He’s a decent fellow,” Oifey replies. He’s known Lester for seventeen years, after all, and can certainly defend the young man's character if not his cooking.

“I heard him teasing his sister.”

And he remembers how Lewyn would tease Dame Erinys until she learned to resist the bait and wonders what dynamics played out in the Silessian royal house that Fee should find teasing so grave a sin. He nearly asks, but Oifey bites his tongue, all the while telling himself, _don’t let yourself see Erinys in her. Don’t go looking for that. She’s half Lewyn, also, isn’t she?_

And Lewyn is there, of course, at Seliph’s side, a green tail of hair snaking over his shoulder. They’re discussing how to handle Ares, a conversation Oifey wishes he might join. But Lewyn does not so much as glance over his shoulder to see how his daughter is getting on, and so Oifey remains with Fee, sipping at the weak soup and talking of better days in Silesse.

_(Recognition)_

In a moment of calm after seizing Darna, Oifey is able to give Diarmuid the additional training he'd promised as they passed through the desert. First they fight a mock battle, armored and mounted, before an audience of Diarmuid’s friends from Tirnanog and a few of Lord Seliph’s new recruits. As the “battle” wears on, they discard armor, mantles, coats. They give their mounts a rest and continue the match on foot in the thick yellow dust.

The Nordions have ever been a theatrical crew, and Diarmuid can look the part of the young tough with his black coat and mighty sliver broadsword, a down-at-the-heel version of his cousin the Black Knight. Now his winsome side is on full display, eyes bright and smile lighting his face even as he begins to lose ground. That smile is more brilliant than ever as he finally yields, done in not by some mishap of style but by the mind games that Oifey’s had so many more years to acquire, the tricks that can give a veteran an edge over a youngster.

Diarmuid might well be all smiles, now the Prince Ares has turned up alive and Lewyn has told him of a mysterious young sister— half-sister, perhaps— in Leonster among the rebels. Tirnanog's odd boy out has a family at last, and Oifey doesn't envy Diarmuid the challenge of cultivating a relationship with Ares… but that can wait.  
Oifey, of course, declines to claim that fine broadsword, a relic of the wars in Agustria, and he offers his hand to Diarmuid to help him out of the dust. The lad is uninjured, though his dark-blond hair has fallen into his eyes in a fringe, the way he wore it when Raquesis first dropped him off at Tirnanog. Oifey feels the strangest stab of recognition in that moment— does he see an echo of King Eldigan, or Ares as a small child?— but then Diarmuid sweeps the stray locks back with a laugh. His glove leaves a trail of dust across his brow.

And then, after offering his thanks for a splendid mock battle, Diarmuid is running off to join his friends Lester and Ulster, running off in the lengthening shadows and last glimmers of light.  
   
 _(Messengers)_

Swirls of mist hang on the air as Sir Midir takes them out at dawn on this hunting trip that’s truly archery practice. Oifey and Finn clutch crossbows as Midir leads them out, singing a few version of the Agustrian marching song taught to them all by the Cross Knights on Lord Eldigan’s recent visit to Evans Castle.

_They came across the border/they said 'give up' but I could not/and I took up my weapon_

They dismount at the water’s edge, where one of the many rivers that flows into Verdane’s great central lake broadens out into a pond strewn with lily pads. Sir Midir, a tendril of hair at his cheekbone curling like the vines of the Spirit Forest, points out two herons standing stark white against the vivid blues and greens of the pond.

“Now we don’t shoot herons here— they’re sacred.”

“Yes! A heron brought the people of Verdane news of the Dark Lord’s defeat.”

“Yes, the herons are are the messengers of the gods.”

They speak in the same instant, each of them offering up what they’ve learned from Lady Edain’s classes. Midir looks at each of them in turn and a smile tugs at one corner of his mouth.

“Right,” he says. “So as long as we don’t aim at the herons, we’ll be fine.”

And so they wait in the reeds, never talking above a whisper, waiting for a more appropriate target. A little breeze off the pond makes the heat easier to bear, but Oifey can feel himself perspiring and he wonders if his face is flushed. It feels uncomfortably warm to him as a pair of ducks fly past and Sir Midir brings both down with his bow, so smoothly it all appears to the eye as a single intricate motion. There is poetry in the flex of his arms, but Oifey doesn’t have the words yet to make those rhymes.

The herons abandon their position among the lilies, and no arrows follow them as they make two elegant shapes against the morning sky.

_(Love)_

Oifey is glad to leave Darna, for the Holy City he’s known from the pages of old books has been so despoiled by the Empire and the Loptyrian cultists that it sickens him. He’s already thinking of Alster, where King Bloom sits on a usurper’s throne, thinking not of justice but that in the capital he might get a decent shave and a trim for the mustache he started growing the day Edain mentioned he was starting to resemble Lord Sigurd.

Yet Alster is weeks away, and now Oifey’s world is the tent he shares once more with Shannan. The presence of his old companion brings him a relief that Oifey feels in his bones as well as his heart; truly, he’s _missed_ Shannan since the prince went off like some solitary questing hero to find the Balmung. In the quiet that follows curfew, the shadowed moments that still feel vaguely illicit, Shannan chuckles over the antics of the thief he’d met in the ruins of Yied, the blonde girl who’d run off with the Balmung even as he’d tried to lay claim to it. Oifey laughs with him for all that he finds something uncanny about the girl, something to set him ill at ease. The same could be said, though, of so many of Lord Seliph’s young soldiers…

“What do you think about Larcei?”

The frank question makes Oifey more uncomfortable than the thought of Shannan’s thieving admirer by at least one order of magnitude.

“Think of her? I’m finding her quite capable in combat. She’s reined in some of that reckless behavior we saw in the skirmishes around Tirnanog.”

“No, I mean, what do you think of _her_?”

“When I think of Larcei,” Oifey says, with deliberate gravity, “I remember the time she and Ulster chewed the finish off all four legs of my writing desk.”

“Oh, come on. You can’t blame her for that. She was two years old at the time.”

“Exactly.  No matter how tall she gets, or how well she fights, part of me will always think of her as being two years old.  I don’t find that attractive.”

He has to be blunt; there’s no mistaking the way Larcei looks at her elder cousin, and Shannan’s indulged her fancies to a point.

“You can hold different ideas of someone in your head. I mean, sometimes I look back on that dumb little kid who let Lady Deirdre go outside the fort alone. Am I that kid, or was I that kid? Are we really the same... thing?”

Oifey doesn’t want to ponder this topic— not about his current self as opposed to the naive boy at Sigurd’s elbow during the last war, not about the girl from Silesse who is neither Erinys nor Lewyn but neither and both in the same moment. His thoughts on Lady Fee run so deep and long that he’s caught off-guard by Shannan’s next question and so answers honestly.

“What do you think about Julia?” 

“I hope Seliph isn’t in love with her.”

He regrets it at once, but in response Shannan mutters a rueful _Yeah, me too_ and then falls into sleep, leaving Oifey alone with contradictory thoughts that cannot be reconciled, most of all that the cardinal virtue of love has limits to its scope of redemption and 

_(Borders)_

Borders are often invisible lines, something that exists nowhere outside of a cartographer’s fancy. The line they cross into the Manster District is anything but, as the sandy soil around Melgen yields to rich and fertile earth, the life-giving earth that makes this land one of Jugdral’s two breadbaskets.

Oifey can hear Diarmuid’s intake of breath as the clouds break open and slanted rays of sunlight glide over the rolling landscape. And such a landscape it is— rounded hills like mounds of lush velvet, a world apart from the rugged steppes of Isaach, which never looked so inviting even when the spring rains turned them green for a season. Diarmuid, cast from the earthly paradise of Agustria before he was born, has never seen anything of its kind, and Oifey himself has seen the Manster District but once.

“We traveled here for Princess Ethlyn’s wedding to Prince Quan…”

And he tells Diarmuid of this memory, one so joyous that Oifey has not wanted to recall it these past seventeen years, one that takes him back to a world of grand cathedrals and splendid military parades. Diarmuid listens, a rapt smile gracing his handsome young face, but Diarmuid has never seen the great cathedrals of Isaach as anything other than hives of the imperial cult. He has never seen a uniformed military host that didn’t want him dead. He has been told but never _felt_ what Oifey once felt to his very soul and has since been disabused of, that the entire construction of state— king and knights, church and bishops— serves the common good. Diarmuid and his young friends do not bristle at being called _rebels_ against the emperor and his hands in the same way that Oifey mentally protests every time that he is no rebel but a partisan of the _rightful_ heir to both Chalphy and Grannvale itself.

Rebels, insurgents, true royalists… whatever they are, here in the emerald meadows of what used to be the kingdom of Alster, Lord Seliph’s own partisans collide with a smaller and more tattered band. Only three remain, creeping along the ridge of the hill— a boy of about fifteen in dented white armor, a blonde girl upon a pony, and a knight whose coat of deep blue wool is so shockingly familiar that Oifey is disoriented for a moment. 

“Lord Oifey,” says the other.

 _How did you even know me? That was half a lifetime ago and I am not what I was then._  
   
“Lord Finn.”

The breeze ruffles his azure hair, and the lance he carries is the one that splashed blood through every dominion in Agustria twenty years before. In this world that’s been torn to pieces and pieced back together upside down and backwards, one thing, it seems, hasn’t changed. Has refused to change.

There is no time to process any of this; Bloom’s forces are already visible on the crest of the next hill, a squadron of mages in formation. Oifey lets Finn and the two youngsters pass to the rear of their own lines as Lord Seliph’s “rebels” brace themselves for the next confrontation.

_(Maps)_

Oifey’s been looking forward to the map-making assignment Lady Edain’s promised them, but on the appointed day Finn isn’t in class. He’s overworked himself in the heat, Edain says, by trying to balance his duties to Quan with the assignments she’s given him.

“Oughta take off that heavy wool coat once in a while,” mutters Dew. 

The impertinence strikes Oifey in just the right way— or the wrong way— and he isn’t fully able to stifle a titter. Edain overlooks their improper behavior as she goes over the assignment one more time and then turns Oifey, Shannan, and Dew loose upon it. It is, Oifey thinks, a much different atmosphere with only the three of them drawing up maps by hand. He’d been steeling himself to compete with Finn, pitting his own drafting skills against Finn’s memory for detail. Instead he’s working in the company of two boys who don’t even have the same concept of “map” as anything Oifey envisions.

Shannan uses thick lines and bright colors. His map shows Isaach as the center the world, a road connecting southern Isaach directly to Verdane and studded with landmarks Shannan passed as he and his aunt Ayra fled their homeland, and very little detail otherwise. Dew produces a marvelous interpretation of Verdane and its borderlands, with great attention paid to hideouts and caches of loot and very little heed for terrain or scale. Oifey looks at his own painstaking lines and topographic details and realizes, with the strangest sense of glee, what he might _learn_ from the other boys.

He wants to travel Shannan’s mad road between here and Isaach, wants to dive into all Dew’s hiding places and uncover their secrets. It is, perhaps, the happiest day Oifey passes in Edain’s little schoolroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the sacred herons are a Tellius reference. If Tellius references are found in future-Archanea aka Ylisse they may as well be in Jugdral.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally worked on two parallel stories, one called "Breaking the Yearlings" for Gen1 and the other called "No Indispensable Man" for Gen2. I decided to merge the two, in a pattern of two steps forward in time, one step back. I hope it proves effective.


End file.
